


Lethe

by iguanastevens, magicalyoyo (iguanastevens)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Biopunk, Body Horror, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Science Fiction, doom and gloom with a happy ending, in which yuri mindmelds with cavefish for plot reasons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2019-11-09 01:17:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17992067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguanastevens/pseuds/iguanastevens, https://archiveofourown.org/users/iguanastevens/pseuds/magicalyoyo
Summary: The Archivist knows what has been written, the Prophet knows what is to come, and the Oracle knows what is known. They are part of something larger, but that something is coming to an end.





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me dragging myself out of hell to throw the next step in my exponential worldbuilding at y'all. There's a lot of stuff in here, but I promise the pieces will fall into place soon enough. :)

         The world was dying.

         The world had always been dying. This is the nature of time, of life, of death.

         The first Prophet felt its destruction in her bones even as life sprang up around her. She did not speak of what she saw, and she was not asked of this young world’s fate.

         She could not have answered.

         She would not have answered. 

:: :: :: 

         “Tell me,” Yuri instructed.

         “Where would you like me to begin?” Otabek did not voice his quiet puzzlement, the question Yuri could feel in his mind, bright as sunlight. He knew that this story brought no surprises, but nevertheless, he would tell it without hesitation or complaint. The Oracle had asked this of him.

         “Wherever you like.” Yuri waved a hand. Blue veins and iridescent wires traced a map of circuitry under his skin. Otabek’s silent gaze fell to his arm. The patterns were more visible than before, their contrast ever starker against his pale wrist. “When you found the caves.”

         Ge’s roots reached far under the earth, well past the deepest pools, and Yuri knew the caves as any creature that dwelled within them did. He felt the coolness of rushing water and the vibration of shifting rock – but the fish and insects had no eyes and no light, and so he had not seen.

         “The cave mouth was a narrow opening set into the base of a small cliff,” Otabek began. “I don’t think that anyone else had been there for a long time.”

         They hadn’t. Yuri knew of it from the bats that made their home inside and the creatures that sought its shelter from cold and rain. He listened to Otabek speak, and to the knowledge that rose within his mind as it resurfaced and took on new dimensions.

         The walls of the cave were painted in greys and browns, with flashes of startling color – oranges, pinks, and reds – threaded throughout the striations as Otabek made his way deeper. In some places, Ge’s translucent wires broke through the rock, visible in black threads as thin as hairs woven through stalactites and tree trunks of silver coils bursting from the floor. Water trickled, etching new runnels into the rock with the patience of stars.

         The images were now the insubstantial wisps of memory, their vibrancy blocked off like the shine of a butterfly’s wings spread out behind a glass display, but Yuri had watched in his mirror as Otabek explored the passage. Part of him itched to reach for it now, for the clarity it would bring, but the pull of Ge’s wishes were outstripped by the gentle rise and fall of Otabek’s voice.

         One passage was striped in brilliant orange and ghostly white. Ge’s roots were thick here; inky black ropes cut through the bright colors, turning the rock into a tiger’s fur. Otabek knew that Yuri would love the pattern. He spent a few extra minutes poring over the details, committing every inch of the room to memory.

         To Otabek, he was not always the Oracle. Sometimes, he was only Yuri. 

         The cave had quickly become impassable – not because Otabek couldn’t have crawled deeper into the ever-narrowing passageways, but because he must not. This was not his world. The weight of his boots, the oil on his skin, the heat and life of his breath: they were alien to this place. Otabek came to a halt several meters beyond the tiger’s room and withdrew a vial from his bag.

         The fireflies were heavier than they looked, and seemed too dense for their filmy wings. Their metallic bodies warmed in his palm.

         Otabek woke them with a breath. When he peered into the viewscreen, he would see their soft infrared glow. He knew this, but he tried not to _know_ it. It was not important; it was not what the Oracle had sent him to know.

         The fireflies darted into the pristine darkness.

         Otabek had been trained for this. He was taught to explore places no others could reach without leaving a trace, yes, and to operate the technology granted to him through the Oracle and Ge.

         But more than that: Otabek was trained to know, to remember, to observe.

         Knowledge is a tricky thing. It is easy to know something that is false, and to allow facts to be corrupted by belief. These narratives, warped as they were by circumstance, were… difficult. Yuri could only make sense of them in collections, carefully stitching together a patchwork of forgotten details and mistakes, looking for the truth behind what was known.

         Otabek watched the fireflies’ descent on his screen. His knowledge was clear and quiet, free from commentary and interpretation. He remembered the narrowing, winding passages stitched with Ge’s roots and, after many hours, the pale, eyeless fish that flicked through the water.

         “What was it like?” Yuri interrupted. “Tell me what I don’t know.”

         “What you don’t know.” Otabek blinked the veil of recollection from his eyes. He was tired, from both the journey and the taxing requirements of recounting nearly-perfect memories.

         “ _Your_ thoughts,” prompted Yuri. “I know you have them occasionally.”

         He smirked at Otabek’s soft huff of surprised laughter.

         “It scared me,” said Otabek, after a moment of thought. Yuri felt his mind once more, released from the strict organization of his work. “The caves reached so far from the sun. I wondered what it would be like to be in that darkness.”

         “I could tell you.” It wasn’t a taunt. It was simply his nature, and though Otabek was not permitted to make requests of the Oracle, Yuri was not explicitly forbidden to offer.

         “No thanks,” Otabek replied quickly.

         “You don’t want to know?”

         “Not particularly.” His lips quirked into a small smile. “And if I did, I think it would be something to learn for myself.”

         It was the answer that Yuri had expected, and the answer that Otabek always gave.

         Choosing not to know was a strange freedom. It was not an option open to the Oracle, nor was it one Yuri had spent much time considering in his life before. He could know how it felt, but he could not feel it for himself. This, too, nagged at him, but this pull was not borne of the wires that snaked through his veins.

         “Go on. Rest, or whatever.” Yuri dismissed Otabek with a curt nod. They were both tired, though Yuri’s fatigue could not be cured with something so simple as sleep. Otabek’s thoughts were slipping between impersonal, calculating order and flickers of emotion he was so carefully trained to restrain. It would not do to keep him longer. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. We need you to go out again.”

         Otabek nodded, accepting the duty without complaint, and Yuri could not tell him more.

         He would learn soon enough. He would have to.

         Yuri watched him walk from the chamber, unburdened by the knowledge and wires that chained the Oracle to this place.

         Yuri knew that Otabek would find out – _Yuri_ knew _._ Not the Oracle. Not Ge.

         Otabek’s mental clarity so rarely slipped. The were moments of indulgence, such as the extra few minutes spent examining the cave painted with a tiger’s stripes, but his mind did not falter and fall into the clumsiness of untrained thought.

         It never did, except... as the fireflies dimmed and settled into dormancy on the slick cavern walls. They would not return to the surface. They would remain in that infinite darkness until they were returned to Ge, slowly absorbed by the metallic roots of their world.

         For an instant, Otabek had stumbled. He had known suspicion, doubt, understanding, and fear. He had known that these tendrils were the same wires that threaded beneath the Oracle’s – beneath Yuri’s - paling skin.

         The world was dying.

         The world had always been dying. This is the nature of time, of life, of death.

         The last Oracle felt its destruction in each breath and each drop of energy that bled from his veins to forestall its end. He did not speak of what he knew, and none would ask him of this ancient being’s fate.

         He could not answer.

         It would not be saved.  


	2. Styx

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to set this story aside for a bit because ugh, time, but now I am BACK.   
> Also, username change, it's iguanastevens now but I'll keep the magicalyoyo pseud for a while so y'all know who I am.

         Yuri Plisetsky stood at the foot of the Oracle’s mountain and wished for answers.

         He was not alone. The seekers made up an ever-changing camp, huddled in groups or contained in careful solitude, waiting, waiting, waiting. They trickled in with hopeful, hungry eyes and trudged away after days or weeks or months. Occasionally an attendant would appear and, ignoring the dozens of eyes that lit upon them as if knowledge were a prey so easily hunted as deer or rabbit, unerringly pick an individual from the crowd to be ushered into the mountain.

         These, the sated, would emerge later wearing expressions of rage or joy or grief; and always, they walked away with slow steps and hunched shoulders.

         Yuri sneered. His very blood ached with rage as the other seekers murmured to each other. Most often, they discussed their questions.

         _Why have the crops failed?_

_Where is my sister?_

_Who can cure the disease that has left so many empty beds and full graves?_

         They were idiots. They staggered in, starving, and begged for a loaf of bread when they could have had a feast.

         One question.

         One question about what was, what is, what will be, one chance to understand… and they were so determined to waste it that they waited for months on the rocky, windswept cliff.

         An attendant stepped from the shadows and met his eyes. Yuri returned her cool, hard stare with one of his own.

         He entered the Oracle’s mountain.

         He did not look back.

         The caves they walked through were not stone. Instead, they were cloaked in a tapestry of wires that gleamed and glittered so that the walls themselves seemed to breathe.

Yuri inspected them with a clinical interest: they ranged from filaments thinner than spider’s silk to great coils so large that a barely perceptible curve tipped the floor beneath.

Their steps did not echo in the chambers of Ge’s heart.

His stomach roiled and he forced his gaze from the mesh. Something in its color, an eerie spectrum of texture and hue that ranged from dull, matte ash to the glittering black of a beetle’s carapace, drove a spike of pain and nausea through Yuri’s skull. He let his surroundings fade into a disorienting blur and the sickness passed.

“The Oracle,” announced the attendant, coming to a halt before a heavy iron door. It, too, was veined with wires.

Yuri blinked at her, dazed, before clenching his jaw and reinforcing the iron set of his shoulders, and opened the door.

“Hello,” said the Oracle. He smiled, white teeth in a white face under silver hair, pale hands folded where they rested on the wooden table, and shook his head. “No, don’t ask yet. Sit down. Tea will come soon. The water is just boiling.”

Yuri fought back a snarl and sat across from the man. He mapped the wires that threaded through the Oracle’s skin, embroidering his wrists, weaving through his long hair like silver ribbons, and bit his lip before a burst of curiosity could escape and ruin everything.

“Oh, stop that.” The Oracle waved a long-fingered, wire-trailed hand. “You don’t have to sit there like you’re trying not to pass gas, Yuri. You can ask your other questions. This isn’t a trick, or a game you can lose. Besides,” he went on with a wink, “to continue the metaphor, I can already smell it.”

         Yuri’s anger flared white-hot, hands aching with the pressure of his clenched fists.

         “Only one question is permitted,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “One.”

         He held the Oracle’s gaze, staring into the man’s pale eyes; they were grey and clouded, flecked with a clear, brilliant blue that was the only color in his face. Acrid, metallic nausea pooled in the back of Yuri’s mouth and sharp pain pricked at his temples.

         Wires. The Oracle’s eyes were limned with hair-thin strands, a shroud that obscured the border between iris and sclera, leaving only the gleaming black pupils clear.

         “One visit,” the Oracle said at last. “Sometimes one question. Usually, a question is many questions tied together so tightly you can’t see the knot at all, and the heart of it isn’t at all what you thought you were asking.” He sighed. “Tell me, Yuri… you came to us for the truth, yet you search my words for lies. What is it, then, that you were hoping to find?”

         Yuri was silent, a shaken, trembling stillness.

         “If this was a game,” the Oracle said mildly, “you would never win.”

         If this was a game, Yuri had already lost.

         “You already know my questions,” Yuri said, giving in. “Why do you want me to ask them?”

         The Oracle leaned back, letting his hands rest in his lap. “There will be honey with the tea. You prefer honey to sugar. I do not know what sort it will be.”

         Yuri frowned.

         “I have so few surprises now. They place the tea in unlabeled boxes, you see, and rearrange them until no one knows which is which. It will remain a mystery until it arrives and I open the box as long as I don’t focus my attention on it and piece together the knowledge of a dozen different people, but for the most part-“ The Oracle wrinkles his nose. “Oh dear. Jasmine.” He speaks into a narrow band around his wrist. “Could you be a darling and switch the tea? I’m afraid I paid it too much attention.”

“ _Oh, again?_ ” A soft laugh. “ _Of course, but do try not to think about us this time.”_

         “You’re a gem. I’ll do my best.”

         Yuri shook his head in an attempt to clear the fog that muffled his thoughts. He was two steps behind after a lifetime of dancing ahead with a quicksilver mind, and he did not enjoy the sensation. “What? Why-“

         “You wondered about the tea.” The Oracle shrugged. “I answered, and you are confused because you did not know your own question. That is why you must ask.”  

         “Okay.” Yuri exhaled slowly. “How many questions can I ask?”

         “Until they bring us to your true question.”

         “Why do you ignore so many people? They came to you for help and you just let them sit there until they lose hope and leave.”

         “The Oracle does not exist to help people.” He pauses and calls, “Come in!”

         Yuri starts as the door swings open and a young man comes in, pushing a small cart. There’s a pot of hot water, two cups, and two plain, sealed tins, along with a bunch of grapes and a bowl of carnelian pomegranate seeds.

         There is no honey.

         “Oh, I forgot.” The Oracle smiled ruefully. “I do apologize. Could you please-“

         “No, it’s fine.” The sweetness of his tea was immaterial; more than anything, Yuri didn’t want another interruption. “Thanks,” he added, a second too late.

         “Very well, no honey. Thank you,” he said, and the young man smiled and left. The Oracle turned his cloudy eyes back to the table. “Grapes. I do like grapes. Even from the same vine, you never quite know if each one will be sweet or tart until you try.”

         Yuri picked at the pomegranate, quieting his frustration. There was no way to guide a conversation with the Oracle, he’d realized. He was being led to the conclusion, to his goal, with no say in the path it took to get there.

         “People are like that too, sometimes. There are those who, when faced with their answers, respond in ways that even they could not predict. It can be very… interesting.” He opened a tin. “Oh, jasmine again, but so much more pleasing now that it is a surprise. The Oracle does not exist to help people. Ge has more pressing uses for my time.”

         “Then why-“

         “I do try to help where I can, but only because I wish to. It is not our purpose. The questions…” He sips his tea with colorless lips. “They keep me human. Like tea. Like grapes.”

         Yuri’s hands shook. He chewed the pomegranate seeds mechanically, one by one, each one bitter or sweet or acid, and stared at the Oracle. Pale skin, pale hair, pale, clouded eyes. He did not seem very human.

         He had everything, and he cared only for tea and grapes and surprises.

         “You are very young,” he said, setting his tea down carefully. “You could learn so much on your own.”

         “Not enough,” Yuri spat. “Never enough, not if I spent every hour of every day of my life trying. There will always be more. I want to know.”

         “Are you sure?”

         “Yes.” Yuri’s heart hammered. He would not beg for a loaf of bread or a feast. He would demand more than that, more than anyone. “I need to know.”

         “What do you want to know, Yuri Plisetsky?”

         “Everything,” Yuri whispered. “I want to know everything.”

         The first wire stung as it crept under his skin, snaking through his veins and nerves, but Yuri refused to cry out.

         Then the world shattered. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyway, if you've made it to chapter two of this you are probably on board with my weird surrealism shit and may be interested in checking out my first published zine piece, [An Empty Sun!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18392375) I am very proud of it.


	3. Acheron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIIIIIVE

        Otabek’s job was never predictable – Ge’s thoughts, even interpreted by Yuri, followed a logic too intricate for him to even hope to understand. His duty was to fill in the gaps of knowledge, no matter how inconsequential the detail may have seemed to a human mind.

        Now, however, the reason for his task did not elude him.

 _“I don’t know. I… did. I used to. It was known and now I do not know. It_ is _known and I do not know.”_

        Otabek wasn’t being sent to an isolated cave or a burned forest. Instead, he steered his hoverbike towards nothing – towards a patch of land that was cut out of the world. He steeled himself for the destruction he was sure to find. If Ge had been so badly damaged, even the ashes must have been destroyed.

        The Oracle was weakened and weakening. Otabek tried to control his thoughts, to keep his knowledge calm and clear, but it turned to fear and bitter guilt whenever he remembered the grey pallor of Yuri’s skin.

        The disaster Otabek approached must be connected. He would learn what had happened and how it could be fixed. Ge would heal.

        It came as a bit of a shock when Otabek’s bike dropped out from under him. It crashed from the air as if gravity had chosen to take its dues after so many years of flight.

        (Far behind him, the Oracle screamed, a sharp and gasping sob torn from his throat and devoured by the wired walls.)

        His stomach lurched. Otabek gasped, halfway to crying out, but the sound was slammed back into him as he hit the ground.

        Otabek lay still and tried to count his limbs.

        His tally came back with the right number, and aside from the ache of bruises blossoming under his skin and the cool, burning sting of the scrapes that gleamed wetly on his palms, he was uninjured.

        The bike was another story. It lay where it had fallen after momentum ran its course, unscratched and undented and completely nonfunctional. When Otabek laid his hand on it, he could feel nothing of the hum of its inner workings – the torn skin of his palm protested the slight, fading heat and the pressure of his touch, but the bike was still and dead.

        It sparked a pang of unexpected loss, one that Otabek did his best to smother as he pried open the storage compartments to extract his equipment. There was not much that was his. There was not much of him. He had been hollowed and honed into the Oracle’s tool – a path he had chosen, the choice made over and over again until it had drowned the question – but the whole of that was greedy and left little room inside him for him.

        There were the moments with Yuri, the gifts of quiet jokes and tiger-striped caves, and there were the long hours and days on his bike. 

        Now the bike was gone, Yuri was fading, and Otabek was left searching for answers he could not find and did not dare to name.

        One deep breath. Another.

        He forced himself back to clarity. Each exhale emptied him, washing away the muddied waters of emotion, of the instinctual human need to understand that which was not his to interpret. Thoughts, feelings, memories: these were of no use to the Oracle. They were stripped and filed away.

        Ge’s wires would find this bike and cocoon it, breaking down the materials and putting them to new use, like the fireflies left to the depths of the caves, like-

        The bike would soon be gone, and with nothing more than a brief message – it was unlikely that something as small as this would have merited Yuri’s conscious notice - a replacement would be sent. Ge was-

        Otabek stopped. He had been sloppy in his work, allowing his self-assured and faulty knowledge race ahead of the inexorable crawl of observation.

        There would be no message. Though sunlight shone hot and bright overhead, the world had been plunged into darkness. The display on Otabek’s wrist was blank, a dull, unblinking eye; the rest of his equipment was equally unresponsive.

        As he pressed the passing moments into sharp lines of knowledge, barely aware of the nauseating pound of his heart, Otabek took in the death of the earth he stood upon. He could see Ge as metallic specks in the bark of the surrounding trees, but no threads of silver and black stood out against the green leaves. The bike, a rich store of elements scarce to this isolated region, was yet untouched.

_It was known and now I do not know._

        For the first time in his life, Otabek was completely alone.

        Ge was gone. The vibrant forest feasted on the land just as bloat and rot fell upon a corpse. The world’s veins were pitted with rust, unable to reach, to grow, to live.

        Otabek pushed forward on numb legs. It was impossible to suppress the horror permeating the air and sinking cold claws into his nerves, but his observations were distant and untouched. The Oracle would not know his fear. His knowledge would be clean once he made his way from the graveyard.

        The Oracle sent him to learn, to remember, but that simple task was beyond Otabek’s abilities. He was unable to carry back so many details, to note the shadow of every tree and the tone of each bird’s song. Even if he could, it would not be enough, not without the sustained flow of information from Ge’s countless other eyes and ears.

        He could not heal this wound, but he must find its source.

        The forest’s vitality faded as he walked. Its jeweled colors faded to ashen grey and desiccated browns. Ge’s wires were thick and gnarled where they erupted from patches of dirt and skeletal branches.

        Eventually, Otabek was surrounded by ghosts. The hum of insects and chirp of birds had been left behind in the greenery. Now he stood in silence, his breaths loud amongst the dry, broken wood. He pressed his hand to a cracked boulder. It was a misshapen honeycomb filled with bulbous knots of wire, larvae that would never sprout wings.

        It crumbled at his touch. Otabek recoiled, stumbling back as thick, dark oil spilled from cracks in Ge’s decaying limbs and dribbled into the dry soil. His throat burned with its acrid, cloying stench. 

        He stared, unable to tear his eyes from the shining clots, and shuddered. The image of Yuri’s face rose in his mind. Otabek gagged, still backing away from the spreading fluid, as he thought of the diseased wires distorting Yuri’s weakening form. 

        There they were again, the biases of emotion and interpretation creeping in despite his years of meticulously honed control. Faltering here, now, was inexcusable. His knowledge had never been so important before. The world was dying, and with it…

        Otabek had been hollowed out, but not thoroughly enough. He should not have allowed himself to care for Yuri, to let himself believe that he saw something of the boy who had become the Oracle. If he was to be of use – if he was to fulfill his duty – his own desire to do so must be forgotten. A hammer did not contemplate the nails it struck.  

        When Otabek’s eyes cleared, he saw that the wasteland stretched past the distant horizon, a monochrome pastiche of its former life rendered in Ge’s twisted, distorted skeleton. Someone else may have been able to look away, to turn their face and mind from the scene, but Otabek had given up the luxury of lying to himself long before.

        Otabek witnessed the world’s death and forced himself to know it. When he left, he carried it with him.

        Its weight made the signs obvious. The forest told a story. The trees bent at odd angles, their trunks curving into sharp angles where they should have risen straight. Most bore deep fissures; several were split down the middle and the splintered halves gaped to the sky like open jaws. Others simply rotted on the ground.

        Otabek hauled the bike back to where Ge yet breathed. It was a long, laborious process, but the burn in his muscles wasn’t enough to distract him from the hints of destruction in the still-green, still-dead world: torn roots of both trees and Ge were visible in the plowed rut left by the bike as it skidded to a halt, but the thick wires were knotted and warped. There was no sense of sleek purpose to their warped forms, only the sense of uncontrolled growth and desperate hunger.

        It occurred to Otabek that he had seen no animals aside from insects and the occasional darting bird. He did not wish to imagine what had become of them.

        Birds and insects could fly freely, and yet…

 _It_ is _known and I do not know._

        Darkness had long since fallen by the time the bike hummed back to life. Relief washed through Otabek as he stepped from corpse to living earth, though he felt the creeping death following ever-so-slowly behind him.

        His wrist display flashed.

        “Otabek.” The Oracle’s voice, wan and weary, held an unfamiliar note. “Otabek?”

        “Yes. I apologize-“

        “ _Otabek._ Tell me that you are alive and mostly intact.”

        He should already know that. Otabek hesitated as the confusion and uncertainty scattered his thoughts. He was-

        “I do know,” Yuri snapped. “But I want you to tell me. Now.”

        “I am not significantly injured, and I am alive.”

        Yuri sighed, and Otabek recognized his fear as it faded from his voice. “Good. Thank you. I- great. Stay that way, will you?”

        “I’ll do my best.” Otabek gritted his teeth. “I apologize for my inconsistency. Please allow me to return for further inspection if my observations were too obscured.”

        “That won’t be necessary.” It was not a reassurance or a dismissal. Otabek waited. “Write everything down. By hand, on paper. Then come home.”

        Another brief silence fell and settled over them before Yuri spoke again.

        “I don’t know what you saw. I can’t…” He trailed off, but it seemed that Yuri had run out of energy and not words. Otabek’s breath caught, but Yuri continued after a moment’s pause. “It is known, and I do not know.”  


	4. Phlegethon

They did not sit at the table with Otabek’s notes spread out between them and long-cold tea resting at their elbows. The hard wood of the chairs pressed deep bruises into what was left of Yuri’s flesh, gouging his legs and punishing him with the grind of wires against his spine whenever he moved or breathed.

            Instead, Yuri sprawled across a low kline, cushions turning his slump into a slouch. It was not a bed. That had seemed important when he ordered it brought to his chamber – his cell – as had the addition of a second kline, upon which Otabek now perched.

            But it took energy to maintain pride, and all that he had to spare was dedicated to the shadowed halls of Otabek’s knowledge that had recently been so familiar.  

            “Tell me again.”

            The journey. The crash. The blighted land. Ge’s relentless hunger and the void it left behind. The words were meticulous, pinning down each detail for examination with unerring accuracy, but they were only words. He could not touch the knowledge. It scratched and itched behind his eyes, but was beyond Yuri’s reach.

            He was not surprised. The clouds in Otabek’s eyes brewed into a storm, and for the first time, Yuri could not know him.

            “It is known, and I do not know,” Yuri said. He struggled through the fog, grabbing for handfuls of the mist by way of explanation. It slipped from his fingers, but he had to trust Otabek to see what he could not show. “You know, and I do not. I _cannot._ I sent you to learn. Not to know. Not to be known,” he gasped, forcing the words out over his hiss of pain. Yes, he was weak now – but so was Ge.

            Otabek knelt by Yuri, leaning close. He knew that Yuri had to fight for enough breath to speak. He…

            Yuri had learned to feel for the edges of those areas that were forbidden to him, and Otabek still did not know. Not yet. Or – he would not let himself know.

            “Stop being so good at your job,” Yuri whispered. He needed Otabek, who brought him tiger-striped stone and half-hidden smiles. He didn’t need the shell that they – that he – had taught Otabek to become. “You’ve been so close, but you push it away. You forget. Stop forgetting. Look at me. _Look at me._ ”

            Otabek looked.

            He saw.

            And finally, he knew.

Yuri’s relief was undercut with sorrow as another part of Otabek was torn from him. He had one… one companion, and it hurt to give him up, to have his mind pulled away from Yuri in bits and pieces. He would be alone soon. That would hurt more.

It was the only choice he had made since he’d begged for Ge’s embrace, and it was the only one that mattered.

:: :: ::

“I don’t know what to do.” It hurt to look at Yuri, but it hurt more to look away. Otabek served the Oracle. It would be a betrayal to refuse to witness him.

“I don’t either.” Yuri laughed quietly. His pain seemed to have faded now that he was no longer fighting against… against Ge, Otabek realized. Their world was in agony. “Do what you have to do.”

“What I have to do. I…” He let Yuri hear his silent plea, and his apologies.

“You need to know more. Everything that I can tell you.”

It would hurt him.

“I’m sorry. I’m-“

“I told you to do what you have to.” There was fire in him. The Oracle was never meant to fight, but Yuri… Yuri had been born a soldier. “Get up. Your knees hurt.”

They did, but Otabek could not ask more of Yuri, could not demand more of his breath. He stayed where he was, leaning close to catch the faint whisper of the Yuri’s voice.

He disobeyed the Oracle.

“Good,” Yuri said, evidently pleased. “Good. It’s better that…” He paled, jaw clenched, and continued, “I don’t know if you can believe what I say. I might- it might-“

His words might not be his own.

“I understand,” Otabek told him, and Yuri shuddered as Ge’s grip relaxed.

“But really, get up.” Yuri rolled his eyes and forced himself upright. He patted the cushion next to him. “You can sit here. This will take a while.”  

“I-“

The wires trailed from Yuri’s wrist, through his hair, snaked in corded ridges under his skin. For a fleeting moment, Otabek thought that they were the only thing holding Yuri upright – that he was Ge’s puppet in word and deed – but the impression vanished just as quickly as it had arrived. He was afraid to touch Yuri. Part of Otabek whispered that he should be disgusted, horrified by the roots that grew within Yuri’s body, but that repulsion never manifested. Instead…

“You won’t hurt me.”

Otabek had spent years learning to erase himself on command, to filter out his thoughts, his feelings, his memories. He’d believed that he could bury his heart and leave nothing in its place. He’d been wrong.

He’d only been making space for Yuri.

“I shouldn’t,” Otabek said softly. “I…”

“I know.” Yuri smirked at Otabek’s startled exhale. Gentle words contrasted the sharp lines of his hollowed face. “Did you think that I didn’t?”

It might have been embarrassing to have his own feelings laid out before him like this, if Otabek had been anyone else, if Yuri had been anyone other than the Oracle. As it was, he’d given up his secrets long ago.

“I didn’t know,” admitted Otabek.

“You did, just as you know every beat of your heart, every breath,” Yuri said, grinning even as he slumped, already fatigued by the exertion of holding himself upright. “You just didn’t realize. But you did not have to know. You brought me tiger caves and stories. I could have figured it out for myself, even if you didn’t.”

His knees cracked and protested as Otabek rose from the cold stone floor and settled onto the cushioned kline. Yuri lifted an eyebrow in a silent _I told you so_ before draping himself, catlike, over Otabek’s arm and shoulder.

Emaciated though he was, Yuri was _heavy:_ metal, of course, weighed far more than bone.

“People came with questions, and I did not know of them. They were-“ A tremor shook his body. He did not continue, but he did not need to. They had been hidden from the Oracle. “It was difficult, summoning someone who is only visible in their absence, but I had them brought to me when I could.”

That was unusual. Yuri fulfilled that duty of the Oracle through messengers. Long ago, Otabek had heard that those who were granted answers had been escorted to the Oracle in person, but no visitors had entered the mountain in many years.

Yuri continued, speaking in jerky, disjointed fragments. At moments, his eyes would go blank, leaving him motionless but for the twitching spasms of his fingers as he grasped at nothing.

“They spoke to me. Their questions had no answers. I did not have answers. They asked of dying crops, of barren streams, of places where none of Ge’s gifts would function.” Ge did not build for them, but sometimes, it would accept one of their creations and lend it a spark of the world’s life. All that was rejected was consumed, returning its components to the earth. “They asked- they asked of people who had gone missing. Of towns that turned to dust.”  

The Oracle knew all the horrors of the world, but Yuri did not know these. Some may have called that a mercy, but there was no compassion here, only the hoarse rattle of Yuri’s breath.

Otabek told himself that Ge was strong enough to keep its Oracle alive until the world could be healed, but surely neither of them could withstand the battle Yuri was waging for much longer. Cleaning the wound would take time, and pain, and patience.

“You’re wrong,” Yuri mumbled, but he did not say what Otabek was wrong about. “Your turn.”

“My turn?”

“Tell me about… tell me about yourself. Your family. All that you might have told me if I were human.” He smirked. “But you can’t lie about the embarrassing parts. I will know. Like when you were fifteen-“

“Yuri, please, no,” Otabek begged, laughing despite the blush that spread from his elbows to the tips of his ears. “And I thought you wanted me to talk for a while, anyway.”

“I’ll remind you of the details if you forget to include something.” Yuri’s smile broadened into wide, wicked grin. “ _All_ of the details.”

:: :: ::

It took days for Yuri to tell Otabek all that he could, and even then, his contributions were sparse. He could not push himself further – or rather, he could not push Ge further. The few facts he might be able to force from his lips would be useless if there was no Prophet for Otabek to reach.

Yuri could not fight this. Not yet.

“Find the Prophet first,” Yuri told him. He felt Otabek balk at the notion, though the doubt never reached his face. That gave him hope: Otabek had set aside so many of the commands that had been laid upon him, questioning what was unquestionable hour after hour. He would follow this path to its end. “And then, the Archive. Do not return until you have called upon both.”

He would find the Archive first, but he would not recognize it – not without the Archivist.

Yuri closed his eyes to hold back the burning tears and laid back, letting the cushions obscure his face. It was inconvenient. He had not realized that he could still cry.

“I cannot know the Prophet or the Archivist,” he said slowly. “Neither can the Prophet see my future, nor the Archivist my past. We are separate, as your left hand is to your right.”

Their knowledge, and their actions, were forbidden to the Oracle, and thus to the Oracle’s knight.

“Otabek, you will become part of the Prophet’s future and the Archive’s past. You will be changed.”

“No,” Otabek whispered. “I am yours. I will keep it-“

“You will not. You cannot. You must not.” Yuri had traded everything he knew for everything that was known. It had been worth it, then. It had been fair. This was not – this, letting go of one person for everything – this was not fair. “You will see differently. You will know why, and I… I will not know you.”

“You asked about my family.” Otabek turned away, his back to Yuri, and spoke instead to the rocks and wires of the wall. “You asked… you have always asked for my stories. How long have you known?”

“I did not know-“

“Don’t,” Otabek said, finally facing Yuri once more. “Please, don’t. The Oracle did not know, but you did.”

The accusation’s echo hung in the air.

“Years,” Yuri admitted. “For… for most of my time here.”

Otabek’s shoulders slumped, arching the straight line of his back. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you were alone.”

He sat next to Yuri, offering a hand, and Yuri allowed Otabek to help lift him up.

“I gave up my questions when I came to you,” Otabek said. Yuri nodded, pausing in pleased surprise when Otabek reached up to brush a strand of Yuri’s hair from his face. He had not known that Otabek would do that. Otabek had not known either. “But I… I would ask one anyway.”

“I’ll allow it.”

“May I kiss you?” Otabek smiled, slow and sad and hopeful.

“Yes.”

 _I’m sorry,_ Yuri thought, lingering on the warmth of Otabek’s lips. _I am still lying to you. But not about this._

And then it was time.

“This is the last command I will give you.” Yuri steeled himself. He would not cry, and he would not hide. “Do what you must.”

 _Afraid._ That was it. He was afraid.

“No matter what it is, do what must be done.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have an otayuri discord server - [come hang out!](https://discord.gg/f57k5Ec)


End file.
